Aurelia Butler

Interest in the Menendez brothers has intensified after the release of a new Netflix drama about the case. A separate documentary is forthcoming.George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney, said on Thursday that his office was reviewing a decades-old case involving the brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, who killed their parents in their Beverly Hills home and were sentenced to life in prison.The case in the 1990s was one of the first to draw a daily national audience to a televised criminal trial. By their own testimony, the two young men marched into the den of the family’s mansion one evening with shotguns and fired more than a dozen rounds at their mother and father while the couple sat on the couch.Prosecutors presented the brothers as greedy, coldblooded killers, interested in having unfettered access to their parents’ assets, which were valued at about $14 million. Defense lawyers for the brothers argued that they had been sexually molested for years by their father, and had killed out of fear.Mr. Gascón wouldn’t indicate which way he was leaning, but his remarks indicated that the sex abuse claims are among the aspects his office was reviewing. He said his office was divided over whether the brothers should remain in prison for the rest of their lives.“We have a moral and ethical obligation to review what is being presented to us,” he said.Mr. Gascón’s remarks come in the homestretch of his re-election bid as interest in the Menendez case has intensified after the release of a new Netflix drama about the case. The series, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” has been assailed by Erik Menendez and many other members of the Menendez family as grotesque and riddled with falsehoods.Ryan Murphy, one of the series’s creators, has defended his work in interviews. He told The Hollywood Reporter that there was “room for all points of view” and argued that the brothers should be grateful to him for bringing more attention to the case.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Rasheen Everett strangled Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar in her Queens apartment. His 2013 conviction was thrown out because of a judge’s error.For the second time, a Manhattan man has been found guilty in the 2010 murder of a transgender woman.The man, Rasheen Everett, was first convicted in 2013 of murdering Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar, 29, but a mistake by the judge overseeing the case led an appeals court to toss the conviction in 2021, forcing prosecutors to retry the case.On Thursday, a jury in Queens found Mr. Everett, 43, guilty of second-degree murder and of tampering with evidence. The killing was just one example of what the American Medical Association has declared an “epidemic” of violence against people who are transgender.In a statement, the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, said that prosecutors had been determined to pursue the case regardless of the years that had passed since Ms. Gonzalez-Andujar’s killing.“Upon a reversal of a conviction through no fault of the prosecutors, my office built a strong case against this individual once again, and we successfully proved that he callously murdered a young woman 14 years ago,” Ms. Katz wrote.On a March morning in 2010, Mr. Everett strangled Ms. Gonzalez-Andujar, who had advertised her services as a prostitute, in her apartment in Glendale, Queens. Then, prosecutors said, he doused her body in bleach in an attempt to destroy evidence of his crime and stayed in her apartment for more than a dozen hours. He also stole a camera, a laptop, a coat, a cellphone and keys from her apartment and fled to Las Vegas, according to prosecutors, where he was arrested days later. Prosecutors said that his DNA was found under Ms. Gonzalez-Andujar’s fingernails.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The three face federal charges for leading hunts as part of an unlicensed outfitting business separate from their employer, federal prosecutors said.Three big-game hunting guides in Idaho are facing federal charges that they illegally led mountain lion hunts in national forests and then shipped some of at least a dozen carcasses out of state, according to federal prosecutors.All three people were licensed guides in the state and employed by a legal outfitter, but they also booked clients for mountain lion hunts separately from their employer starting in December 2021, the U.S. attorney’s office in Idaho said in a news release.The three guides, Chad Michael Kulow, 44, Andrea May Major, 44, and LaVoy Linton Eborn, 47, led paying clients on hunts through Caribou-Targhee National Forest in southeast Idaho and the Bridger-Teton National Forest in western Wyoming as part of an unlicensed business, the prosecutors said. Their groups killed 12 mountain lions from December 2021 to February 2022, prosecutors said.It’s legal to hunt mountain lions in Idaho for most of the year with proper licensing. The three guides are accused of running an unlicensed outfitter in a side business and not following federal and state reporting requirements of the mountain lion kills.At least three of the mountain lions killed during these hunts were shipped to Texas without being presented to Idaho Fish and Game, the state agency that oversees hunting, prosecutors said. Hunters in Idaho must report and present any mountain lions to the state agency within 10 days of their being killed, according to its hunting season manual. The three hunters also used false business information in their big game mortality reports, which is required by the state agency, prosecutors said.The three were indicted in August on several charges, including conspiracy and violating the Lacey Act, a federal law that prohibits transporting animals that are illegally taken or possessed. All three were arrested last week and have pleaded not guilty to the charges.Lawyers representing the three defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.The most serious charges the three face carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.Nicholas Arrivo, the managing attorney for animal protection law at the Humane Society of the United States, said that the Lacey Act was “vigorously” enforced and has been around since 1900. The law, among the oldest related to wildlife in the country, is meant to prevent illegal animal trafficking, he said.Kristin Combs, executive director of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, said that while most hunters in her state hunted for food, she had noticed that wildlife was increasingly “valued in a very different way.”“This is totally trophy hunting,” she said. “No one is out there, like, eating mountain lion.”She said that trophy hunting — the hunting of animals to display their bodies rather than for food — had increased in recent years.But Ms. Combs added that she did not often hear about outfitters or licensed guides leading illegal hunts.“Mostly,” she said, “outfitters and guides have licenses and want to keep them.” More

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, on Thursday made a direct appeal to Muslim voters, decrying “staggering and devastating” destruction in Gaza and saying that the war between Israel and Hamas should be brought to an immediate end.“This war must end, and it must end now,” Mr. Walz said in a three-minute video address to the virtual “Million Muslim Votes: A Way Forward” event, which was hosted by the group Emgage Action.Mr. Walz said Vice President Kamala Harris was focused on ensuring that “Israel is secure, the hostages are home, the suffering in Gaza ends now, and the Palestinian people realize the right to dignity, freedom and self-determination.”The remarks, while brief, represented an effort by the Harris campaign to reach Muslim Americans who are angered by the Biden-Harris administration’s approach to the Middle East, have long been targeted by former President Donald J. Trump’s rhetoric and policies, and are struggling with their choice in this year’s election.Emgage Action, focused on building Muslim American political power, has endorsed Ms. Harris despite significant discontent among many Muslims over the White House’s support for Israel, which is now fighting in both Gaza and in Lebanon.Mr. Walz spoke to Emgage Action from his home in Minnesota and did not take questions. On the campaign trail, he has been disrupted by vocal pro-Palestinian protesters at rallies in Phoenix, eastern Pennsylvania and elsewhere.In an illustration of the broad and unwieldy coalition that the Democratic ticket is trying to hold together, Mr. Walz’s appearance came on a day when Ms. Harris campaigned with former Representative Liz Cheney, an anti-Trump Republican who has urged Mr. Biden not to withhold arms for Israel. Ms. Cheney’s father, the hawkish former Vice President Dick Cheney, has said he is also planning to vote for Ms. Harris.Mr. Walz spoke nearly a year after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the start of Israel’s staggering response in Gaza, and during a week in which the Middle East seemed to have entered into a long-feared wider war.The conflicts are reverberating within Muslim and Jewish communities in battleground states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania.In Michigan, some Arab Americans voted “uncommitted” during the Democratic primary this year when President Biden was still the Democratic Party’s candidate, issuing a protest vote against Mr. Biden’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza.The Uncommitted National Movement, the national group that organized major protest efforts, has since said it would not endorse Ms. Harris, though it has also urged a vote against former President Donald J. Trump and warned against third-party votes. More

Melania Trump, the former first lady, said in a video on Thursday that there was “no room for compromise” on a woman’s right to “individual freedom,” a day after a reported excerpt from her coming memoir said she supported abortion rights.Mrs. Trump’s comments landed as Mr. Trump and his party are trying to soften their opposition to abortion, a key issue threatening his support with women voters and attempt to return to the White House. They were released in a promotional video for a new memoir scheduled for release on Tuesday,, who opposes federal abortion rights and has taken credit for helping overturn Roe v. Wade. “Individual freedom is a fundamental principle that I safeguard,” she said in the video, which was posted to her account on X. “Without a doubt, there is no room for compromise when it comes to this essential right that all women possess from birth, individual freedom. What does my body, my choice really mean?”On Wednesday evening, the British news site The Guardian published excerpts from Mrs. Trump’s book, in which she appeared to go a step further than her words in the video: “A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.”A spokeswoman for Skyhorse Publishing, the publisher of the book, did not respond to a request to confirm the book’s contents or supply an early copy.Mr. Trump, aware of the political pressure over his position on abortion rights, has gone from crowing over the downfall of Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion, to pondering what limits on the procedure he would be willing to accept.Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, Republicans have toyed with the idea of national abortion limits even as a number of state ballot measures to protect access to the procedure have succeeded.And Democrats have seized on the slate of new abortion restrictions in Republican-led states — and the harrowing stories from women who have died or faced life-threatening complications tied to restrictions on health care — as a winning issue ahead of November.So, in recent months, Mr. Trump has waffled on his views on access to the procedure. In a presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris last month, he declined to say whether he would support a national ban on abortion.On Wednesday, in an all-capital-letters post on social media, Mr. Trump said: “Everyone knows I would not support a federal abortion ban, under any circumstances, and would, in fact, veto it, because it is up to the states to decide based on the will of their voters (the will of the people!).”Mr. Trump went on to say he supported exceptions for abortion if a woman had been raped or a victim of incest, or if her life were in danger. More

Alex Katz admired a Mark di Suvero sculpture and gave it to the Brooklyn Museum. It now has pride of place in the museum’s 200th anniversary celebration.Consider two artists, now both in their 90s and both still working, who do not know each other personally despite coming up in the New York art scene around the same time.One of them, Alex Katz, became the painter of some of the most recognizable portraits of our age, the other, Mark di Suvero, a welder of huge steel sculptures that are ubiquitous wherever outdoor art is found.This is not a buddy comedy setup, but rather the philanthropic back story behind the recent permanent installation of a nearly 15-foot-tall abstract sculpture by di Suvero, “Sooner or Later” (2022), on the plaza in front of the Brooklyn Museum.The work is a gift to the museum from the Alex Katz Foundation, picked out by the painter himself, to honor the museum’s 200th anniversary.Katz, 97 and still making new paintings, went back to Paula Cooper Gallery three times to see it, before making the purchase; the gallery said that similar works are priced in a range from $3 million and $5 million.“I saw it in the window and thought it was fantastic,” said Katz, known for his striking, flattened and highly stylized portraits, frequently taking his wife, Ada, as a subject. (He had a large retrospective at the Guggenheim that began in 2022.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that, if elected again, he would revoke the legal status of tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants who have been the target of false accusations by the former president and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, over the past month.Mr. Trump’s administration tried to do that during his first term, too, but courts temporarily blocked it, and President Biden’s administration renewed the immigrants’ status after he took office in 2021.The immigrants in question are living and working in the United States legally through the Temporary Protected Status program, which Congress created in 1990 for people from countries experiencing war, natural disasters or other crises. The Department of Homeland Security designates countries for up to 18 months at a time based on the current conditions, and the designation can be renewed indefinitely. Haiti was initially added in 2010, under President Barack Obama, after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated the country. It has since experienced a major hurricane and a cholera epidemic.“Absolutely I’d revoke it, and I’d bring them back to their country,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with NewsNation on Wednesday.He spoke at length about Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, claiming that the city had been a utopia — “you had a beautiful, safe community, everyone’s in love with everybody, everything was nice, it was like a picture community” — and that the Haitians had destroyed it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Algunos de los donantes dijeron que buscaban reparar el daño que la campaña de Trump, y el propio Vance, habían causado al difundir rumores falsos.Decenas de antiguos compañeros del senador por Ohio JD Vance pasaron el debate vicepresidencial del martes por la noche donando dinero a un fondo para inmigrantes haitianos en Springfield, Ohio, y recaudaron más de 10.000 dólares.En las entrevistas, algunos donantes describieron las contribuciones como un esfuerzo para reparar parte del daño que la campaña Trump-Vance —y el propio Vance— causaron al difundir rumores falsos de que los migrantes estaban robando y comiendo mascotas. Los haitianos que viven en Springfield y la comunidad en general se han enfrentado a una serie de amenazas sobre las afirmaciones desacreditadas.Peter Chen —quien fue miembro de la promoción de Derecho de Yale de 2013 junto con Vance y su esposa, Usha Vance— organizó la campaña en un grupo de debate de clase el martes.Chen, quien creció cerca de Chicago y es hijo de inmigrantes, dijo en una entrevista que se sintió gratificado al ver que más de 50 compañeros de clase, o alrededor de una cuarta parte de la clase, habían donado, publicando notas de solidaridad con la comunidad haitiana de Springfield.“Fue emotivo para mí, personalmente, ver todos los diferentes mensajes y ver todas las formas en que las personas siguen reflejando esos valores”, dijo Chen el miércoles, citando los comentarios de su compañero de clase en el sitio de donación, el Fondo de Unidad de Springfield, que fue establecido por United Way.La mayoría de los comentarios publicados por los compañeros de Vance en la Escuela de Derecho de Yale eran simples declaraciones de bienvenida, pero algunos llamaban específicamente la atención sobre Vance y su esposa.Robert Cobbs, abogado de Washington, donó 100 dólares. Junto con su donación, Cobbs escribió: “En honor de JD Vance y Usha Vance. La Clase de 2013 de YLS está en contra de chivos expiatorios y demagogia sacados directamente de los manuales del fascismo. Con amor y una oración para que JD Vance y Usha Chilukuri Vance encuentren la fuerza moral para revertir el curso de sus vidas”.Entre los donantes también se encontraba Sofia Nelson, una defensora pública en Detroit cuya estrecha amistad con Vance terminó después de que se separaran por sus puntos de vista sobre cuestiones LGBTQ.Las donaciones al fondo por parte de antiguos alumnos de la Escuela de Derecho de Yale comenzaron durante el debate y continuaron el miércoles, con más de 60 donantes que se identificaron como miembros de la promoción de Vance.Lorie Hale, directora de operaciones de United Way de los condados de Clark, Champaign y Madison, dijo en un correo electrónico que su organización se sentía “bendecida” por recibir tal apoyo de personas de todo el país en un momento de “atención sin precedentes”.Stephanie Saul es una reportera que cubre la educación superior, centrándose recientemente en los drásticos cambios en las admisiones a las universidades y el debate en torno a la diversidad, la equidad y la inclusión en la enseñanza superior. Más de Stephanie Saul More